This year, the Digital Scholarship Group is taking inspiration from Miriam Posner’s famous blog post, How Did They Make That?, and offering a learning series on how specific digital scholarship and digital humanities projects were created. Our intention is to give people a greater sense of what it takes to do this work, including what skills are needed and what technologies are used. There will be two talks this fall, with more to come in spring. For those who cannot attend, we will record the sessions and make them available here.

• October 2nd, 2:00-3:00, O’Neill Library 307 – Walt Whitman Archive 
  • The Walt Whitman Archive has spent the last thirty years working to make the morass of Whitman’s papers available digitally. Ranging from correspondence to manuscript drafts of Leaves of Grass, the digital Whitman Archive’s contents surpass any physical archive’s holdings of the great American poet’s writing.  Speaking from her years of experience working on the project, Ashlyn Stewart, Digital Scholarship Specialist, will explain the process the Whitman Archive undertakes when bringing a document from image to digitally rendered text.  She will focus on a few key documents–namely, Whitman’s Cultural Geography Scrapbook–to demonstrate the technical and intellectual work required to create a digital archive of Whitman’s works.

• November 7th,   2:00-3:00, O’Neill Library 307 – Visualizing Le Miserables 
  • Antonio LoPiano, Digital Humanities Program Specialist, will discuss text analysis through data visualization and mapping on the project Visualizing Les Miserables. This famous digital humanities project sought to analyze Victor Hugo’s seminal Les Miserables, especially the relative centrality of its cast of characters, their relationships to each other, and the role played by its urban Parisian setting. Antonio will walk through the process of close reading, converting text to data, and creating the visualizations that the team used to reveal new insights into these aspects of the novel’s narrative.

Recorded Presentations

Download the Walt Whitman Archive presentation slides